Sometimes I think it can be helpful to apply room correction, equalization and crossover duties post DAC. This is essentially what is done in the case of powered speakers with built-in DSP, such as JBL 7xx series, or Genelec, or Neumann. Yes, you can feed a digital signal directly into such a speaker, and thereby avoid a step of reconverting the signal to digital, processing, then converting back to analogue, but that sometimes has its drawbacks.
Say you want to stream Qobuz using the Windows app, and use JRiver for room correction, equalization and crossover, then send the processed signal from JRiver over USB to a DAC. You may find it difficult to rid your system of annoying dropouts and stuttering streaming from the Qobuz app to JRiver, whereas if you stream directly from the Qobuz app to USB DAC, you may find the experience better.
If you want to direct a digital signal directly into a powered speaker, you may have to convert to AES first, which not everybody wants to fuss with, as the required gear is less common, and less familiar to some. Then, you can’t play your DSD surround files directly. You’ll have to convert to PCM first, if the powered speaker isn’t capable of decoding the DSD stream. Switching between files of different sample rates may produce pops and clicks, some rather loud, some quite loud.
If you’ve a mind to add a reel-to-reel tape deck, turntable, cassette player, etc. to the mix, you’re out of luck, unless you convert to digital, but then you’ve added the analogue>ADC>processor>DAC back into the soup.
Avoiding unnecessary conversions is a good thing, but between potentially disparate sources from different eras, and the vagaries of digital rights management, it might actually be more straightforward to do the processing post DAC, and starting with an ADC.